Coffee with Q13's Parella Lewis: Storm Detective, Homicide Chaser

Parella Lewis

"Why," I wondered, "is a TV weather forecaster part of the Washington's Most Wanted team?" This seemed like a form of modern metaphysical poetry: heterogeneous ideas yoked together by violence.

I met Parella Lewis in a Starbucks before she was due in at Q13 offices, determined to get to the bottom of this, like a newshound in an ersatz Jonathan Lethem novel. She was dressed for the weather. Point: Lewis.

I had researched, of course. First question/broadside: "I see that you are from Louisiana. Yet you never mention Jimmy Buffett." Turns out Lewis was born in Mississippi, is "not a cajun," but does love crawfish, in boiled or etouffée formats. She came to crawfish late, in her 20s. Relevant? Too soon to tell. Her anti-Buffett stance (not loving Jimmy is anti-) makes sense: the man's a pirate, an outlaw.

Lewis was on a two-track media-and-mayhem course from early on. She began in radio, which accounts for that cadenced enunciation you hear, while in college. But her goal back then was police work, despite the fact that she's medium height and willowy. (Since Wayne Cody, everyone in Seattle TV is thinner than me.) She attended the police academy, graduated in '99, and went to work as a reserve officer on the Lafayette force, logging 30 hours per month as a crime-buster.

She talked her way into undercover work early, and soon reported to her parents (her father is a preacher) that she'd be working as "an undercover hooker." This turned out to require a "gun in your back pocket, and a wire on," as well as detailed knowledge of Louisiana's Napoleonic Code. There was an awkward moment when she was solicited by ex-high schoolmates who, fortunately for everyone involved, didn't recognize her.

Yet, in the meantime, an appearance on a local TV telethon catapulted her out of radio and into the local TV market. Would she trade in her police uniform for forecasting courses? She would. Leaving Louisiana, she moved to Little Rock and then Indianapolis, becoming well acquainted with tornado weather. (A nearby tornado brought a finish flag to the 2004 Indy 500 at lap 450.)

Seattle, across the country, far from family and friends, was not her ideal destination. Even our bad weather doesn't match up. In Louisiana, floods mean "bodies float away regularly," said Lewis--tombs and crypts keep the dead six feet in the air.

Here, the tricky part is not where the funnel will touch down, but the effects of micro-climates on whether it's raining when you look outside or partly sunny. Lewis, in about 30 seconds, gave me a mini-lecture on the interaction of ocean air with the effects of the Olympic and Cascade mountains. Automatically, her voice shifted into that incantatory weather-forecaster mode.

The Washington's Most Wanted team

"I feel like you wouldn't mind if there were more sunshine here," I ventured, and Lewis laughed. Still, she said, compared to the Indianapolis winters, Seattle almost always lets you outside for a walk or a run to keep cabin fever at bay. In Indianapolis, the roads had molasses on them.

Besides, in Seattle, she's back working with the thin blue line. Lewis has worked on a few installments of Washington's Most Wanted now, as their cold case and unsolved crimes correspondent, and she's hoping that something as simple as a sleeve from knit shirt could help solve a 10-year-old homicide.

"Reading weather models, going through old files, it's looking for clues?" I suggested, and Lewis nodded, saying that's in fact how she describes it. Though it's been a decade since she wore a uniform, "police is in your DNA," she said.

One thing that a fondness for storm chasing and undercover stings have in common, it occurs to me, is adrenalin. If you follow her Twitter feed for long, you might come to the conclusion that risk-taking is in her DNA, too. Tweets of inspiration are common, exhorting you to make bold choices.

Even as she discusses her evangelizing for taking big leaps, the words come out in motto form: "Take a few minutes for yourself...stop for a moment and analyze why you are where you are...try to face the smallest fear you have." My sense is that Lewis is cloaking strong beliefs with what sounds like self-esteem boosts. She really does want you to take that leap.

At the end, all I really got to the bottom of was my cup of coffee. But it's still quite a story, even leaving out the "I was a teenage missionary's-daughter-in-Kenya" chapter. (Hollywood, feel free to contact me for a treatment.)